I regard also my memories as an ar(t)chaeological site inside my body. It is where the motivation for this project resides and the reason why I am working on this exhibition as a work of art.
The "Costanza Julia Bani" territory corresponds with the olive groves I grew up with, in the hills close to Pisa, as the place where the fireflies used to live in great quantity.
I have always been returning there, especially since 2016, when my son was born. That spectacle where I could embrace the night and the sounds of the early summer are the findings I personally want to revive. The presence of the fireflies has been diminishing drastically over the years and every time I go back there I fear there will be even less. Light pollution and other factors due to climate change endanger their habitat.
Those fireflies are in my past and my work is an excavation that leads me to my childhood. The fireflies have influenced me as an artist and what I want to represent, stage, perform, express, produce and exhibit.
I have never curated an exhibition before, but for this piece I declare myself a curator. I want to do this international gallery, bridging vast territories, to show my process and be able to take you into my own private findings that might lead anyone visiting to re-consider the beauty of the night. I wish I can guide you through a personal, yet universal story of darkness and its representation.
My aim, my agency is to depict, display and portray the vanishing eco-system of fireflies endangered by light pollution.
It is this actual exhibition the piece I wish to secure in my practice. My ambition is to be the artist, the curator and organizer of my findings, transferring the scientific know-how and narrating along, with a personal mise en scene, mise en espace.
This video is a WIP (work in progress, as it has no colour grading or sound design and mix). It should though be enjoyed without any lights on, possibly on a large screen and have all your attention and patience for around 20 minutes. It is actually thought to become 36 minutes and have a version for domes and installations with a 360 degrees spectrum.
What about the Milky Way and the starry nights?
They come in out of the fear that the fireflies will disappear. They come in, as in 2020, because of this fear, I read a book that changed my view on darkness: Cieli Neri, by Irene Borgna.
I got acquainted with an interdisciplinary work around light pollution, its origins and its consequences. That book, written by an Alpine anthropologist, pushed my boundaries as an artist. I started looking for ways to portray the Milky Way, getting to know how it appeared to us in the past, how it appears today, and how it will appear in the future.
I went up to the Alpine meadows she describes as a place in densely populated Europe, where one can reconnect to the stars and the Milky Way: I went to the Maritime Alps in Northern Italy, to Piano Valasco, Colle Fauniera and the Gardetta Plateau. I reconnected and I want to enable others to reconnect, if not on location, at least through my body of work, that brings back images from a cosmic past.
